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Tool review — Bookmarks · Updated

Pinboard Review (2026)

Bare-bones paid bookmarking, running since 2009

$22/yr

Visit pinboard.in ↗

What is Pinboard?

Pinboard is a paid bookmarking service run by Nine Fives Software, essentially a one-person operation, and has been online since 2009. It stores your bookmarks on its own servers behind a deliberately plain, text-dense interface with no ads, no trackers, and no outside JavaScript. You save pages via browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, bookmarklets, or email, then organize them with tags, tag bundles, and multi-tag filtering. It can mirror saves from Pocket and Instapaper and archive tweets from up to three Twitter accounts. A basic account costs $22 per year; an optional archival tier at $39 per year keeps a full cached copy of every bookmarked page, enables full-text search, and flags dead links. A read-it-later mode, private notes, and a Delicious-style API round it out.

Key features

Where it saves to

Pinboard's own hosted service (pinboard.in)

Pricing

A basic account costs $22/year and includes all core bookmarking features. The optional archival account is $39/year and adds cached copies of every bookmarked page, full-text search, and dead-link detection. There is no free tier or trial, but you can request a full refund for any reason within the first week.

Best for

Long-time web users who want a fast, private, no-frills bookmark archive they pay for directly rather than fund with ads. Especially suited to tag-heavy organizers and people who want permanent cached copies of pages via the archival tier.

Pros

  • Sustainable paid model: no ads, no trackers, no third-party JavaScript, running since 2009
  • Archival tier preserves full page copies with full-text search, so bookmarks survive link rot
  • Fast, dense, text-first interface that handles very large bookmark collections
  • Open API and RSS feeds support many third-party clients and integrations

Cons

  • No free tier at all — $22/year minimum, and page archiving with full-text search requires the $39/year tier
  • No official mobile apps; mobile use relies on a basic mobile website or third-party clients
  • Run by a single person with a deliberately frozen, dated feature set — development moves very slowly

Alternatives to Pinboard

Raindrop.io

Visual bookmark manager with collections and tags

Free + ~$3/mo

mymind

Private AI-organized visual memory for everything saved

From $4.99/mo

Linkwarden

Collaborative bookmarks with full-page preservation

Self-host free; $3/mo cloud

FAQ

Is Pinboard free?

No. A basic account costs $22 per year, and the archival account with full page caching and full-text search costs $39 per year. There is no free trial, but Pinboard offers a full refund for any reason within the first week.

Can I import my Pocket data into Pinboard?

Pinboard can mirror your Pocket saves on an ongoing basis, though when you first turn mirroring on it only picks up roughly the last dozen links. It also imports bookmark files from Delicious, browsers like Firefox and Safari, Diigo, Google Bookmarks, and Instapaper CSV exports.

Does Pinboard work with Firefox?

Yes. Pinboard offers browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, plus bookmarklets that work in most browsers, and you can also save bookmarks by email. Extensions can save the current page or all open tabs at once.

Does Pinboard archive full copies of web pages?

Only on the archival account ($39/year). That tier stores a cached copy of every page you bookmark, makes them full-text searchable, and checks for dead links. The basic $22/year account stores just the bookmark, title, tags, and description.

Where Pinboard fits

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